General Wade Thomas and his wife, Betty, celebrate 70 years of marriage. They met carpooling to work at Lockheed Aircraft in the early’40s where Betty was a Rosie the Riveter and General worked on the secret Skunk Works project. (Courtesy photo)

When you meet General Thomas for the first time you don’t know whether to shake his hand or salute him.

“So, you were a general in World War II?” I ask the 95-year-old former Lockheed Aircraft sheet metal supervisor.

“No, I was a private,” he says. “General is my first name.

“My father was General Wayne Thomas, named after Civil War Union General George Henry Thomas by my grandfather George Washington Thomas. My father named me General Wade Thomas.”

Got that? At least we don’t have to wonder who his grandfather was named after.

“And what did you name your son?” I ask.

“Keith,” General says.

“By the time he came along the guys I worked with at Lockheed on the Skunk Works project for 35 years were calling me Tommy instead because our boss didn’t like having to call one of his employees General.”

I can see where that could be a problem working on top secret military projects. Some civilian yelling, “Hey, General, get your butt over here on the double!”

General’s wife of 70 years, Betty, has no clue who she was named after. I thought maybe pinup girl Betty Grable, but they were born only a few years apart so it’s doubtful.

Betty, 94 now, was a riveter at Lockheed during the war — one of those tough, colorful Rosie the Riveters doing their part for the war effort back home. She fell for General while carpooling to work with him every day.

“Later, when my husband and Keith were building their own planes out in the garage, I did all the riveting on both of them,” Betty says. “The neighbors used to give directions to their homes by using the planes in our garage as a landmark.”

“Your garage must be pretty big,” I say.

“No, it’s a regular two-car garage,” General says. “The wings on the planes fold up. I finally stopped flying and sold the planes about five years ago when I turned 90.”

You sit and talk with General and Betty for a while, and you see two very special people who personify the challenging times the “Greatest Generation” lived through without glamorizing it.

They never made headlines, but they were a big part of the story of this country’s success.

Now they’re in their mid-90s living in a modest Granada Hills neighborhood in a two-bedroom home where Betty still does the cooking and some of the light cleaning. Living with them is their 62-year-old daughter, Sandi, who has been blind since birth.

There was never a doubt in Betty’s mind what she would do after they brought their baby home from the hospital. Her life would forever center around the daughter who still needs her, and raising guide dogs for the blind.

Meanwhile, General was driving out to Rye Canyon in Santa Clarita every weekday morning to supervise the sheet metal shop at the ultra secretive Skunk Works facility named after the moonshine factory in the popular comic strip, “Li’l Abner.”

General spent his days supervising workers pounding out sheet metal for secret aircraft designs, like the U-2 spy plane and next-generation fighter planes Lockheed built with such precision.

Late at night, after the kids were down, Betty and General carved out a little time for themselves in their two-car garage building their own planes.

“I always wanted her to come flying with me, but she never did,” General says. “She always claimed it was too rough up there.”

Sitting across the living room with Sandi, Betty looks up and gives her husband a wry smile.

“I liked building them,” she says. “I just didn’t like flying in them.”

Sandi begins to nod off — time for her nap. As the two women in his life leave the room, General pulls out his charter membership card from 1937 in the Lockheed Credit Union where he was one of the founding members.

“For a while I was the No. 1 man in seniority at Lockheed with 51 years,” he says, opening an old photo album filled with black-and-white pictures of a wedding held 70 years ago last month.

A good-looking kid born in Oklahoma marrying a beauty born in Nebraska. Meeting and falling in love in a car pool in Los Angeles on their way to jobs that helped win a war.

General and his Rosie the Riveter.

“I don’t know what I would have done without that woman,” he says.

If we had a dime for every man who felt the same way, we’d be rich men, General.

Dennis McCarthy’s column runs on Friday. He can be reached at dmccarthynews@gmail.com.

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